A triple threat in the commercial production world, Apple Box Productions’ Cliff Skelton takes on the roles of director, cinematographer and editor.

The Vancouver-based shooter has just over a year of spot directing under his belt, but since August it has been a non-stop ride, with one job overlapping the next, leaving him prepping one spot while posting another.

One commercial on which Skelton pulled triple-duty was ‘Busy Driver,’ a safe-driving message from the Alberta Motor Association that earned him the Top Spot editing craft award.

The chilling :30, through Palmer Jarvis, Edmonton, is about a double tragedy, says Skelton, and flashes back and forth between the worlds of a man chatting on the phone in his cluttered car and that of a young girl playing outside who is on a collision course with the preoccupied driver.

For the driver, Skelton used numerous close-ups, with the side mirror capturing quick flashes and rapid bits of movement of the world outside to convey a sense of clutter. In contrast, the unsuspecting little girl is captured in an open and airy environment, so that when the worlds come tragically together, the impact is heightened.

For Skelton, editing is the best part of the job because he gets to see whether his hard work and well-thought-out camera moves are going to produce the results he’s looking for.

‘You can have the best stuff in the world,’ he says, ‘but if it’s not cut well then it doesn’t matter.

‘I just want it to look good,’ says Skelton. ‘I think sometimes if something has a real stylistic feel or a particular story to it, it helps in the shooting if I know I’m editing. I know what I need and don’t need, and I don’t have to shoot a lot of extra film. It always helps to know what I can work with in the cut.’

While his passion now lies off-screen, the original plan was to make a career in front of the camera, and to that end he studied acting in New York.

It was during this period that Skelton got his first taste of life behind the camera when a wannabe filmmaker friend asked him if he would help out with some shooting.

Smitten, in 1987 Skelton took off to Europe with a Super 8 in hand to try his hand at directing and landed his first paying gig shooting two outrageous :60s for a Zurich client.

Next, with the acting dream fading and his ambition to direct gaining steam, he moved to London and ‘continued to struggle.’ He rented camera equipment, bought film stock and put together a spec reel with, he mumbles reluctantly, the money he made ‘modeling.’

Back in Canada in the early ’90s, he turned his energies to music videos.

His interest in post can be traced back about five years to when friend and Vancouver editor Jane Morris Berry showed him his way around the edit suite and introduced him to the ibm-based digital editing system D-Vision.

‘I just wanted to work on my own stuff and pretty soon I was doing a lot of it,’ says Skelton, who started out cutting all his music videos and soon after a good number of commercials.

Although Skelton can no longer be found strutting his stuff on the runway, he can be seen in the odd commercial.

According to Skelton, working on both sides of the camera has been a definite plus when it comes to getting successful and realistic performances out of the actors.

‘For me, a lot of it is very technical; you can’t move your head too far this way, stand here, keep your hands here. But at the same time it has to look realistic, and I think having done a bit of that myself I know what little things help make it work.’

In terms of style, Skelton wants to be known for his versatility and says he is interested in everything from the straight-ahead stuff to more stylistic movements involving lots of experimentation.

A recent shoot for the Autism Society of Canada, which showed the world through the eyes of an autistic child, gave the director an opportunity to play with film, projecting negatives onto positives and refilming.

More recently, a job for Mark’s Work Wearhouse allowed him to display a comedic bent by turning the festive season on its head.

As soon as he gets a breather from the commercial gigs, Skelton says he hopes to do some more music video work.

But like most in his shoes, he aspires to see his name on the big screen and he has a handful of scripts in the works, one of which he says he may actually finish over the Christmas holidays.